At every Heartland Summit, Heartland Forward recognizes “Secret Sauce” communities from the heartland that are using their own mix of ingredients to compete in the global economy. 

This year, Pulse of the Heartland is taking a closer look at several past honorees to revisit what has made their approaches effective, how they’ve evolved since their initial recognition and what other heartland communities can learn from them. 

The first installment in this series covered Tulsa, Oklahoma. Today, Pulse travels about 250 miles northeast to Kansas City, Missouri. 

Kansas City was named an inaugural Secret Sauce Community in 2018. That recognition capped a decades-long urban transformation, during which a once sleepy downtown became a vibrant historic and cultural district that now hosts attractions like the American Jazz Museum, the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.

What made that transformation possible was the city’s decision to look to the future and invest not only in infrastructure but human capital. Kansas City leaders on stage at the 2018 Heartland Summit shared that building a city requires looking decades into the future, whether 25, 35, or 50 years out. Human capital matters just as much or more than physical infrastructure.

This summer, Kansas City saw the benefits of that future-looking vision when it landed a once-in-a-generation event: the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Arrowhead Stadium held six matches, and the broader region hosted training camps for three of the biggest teams in the world, Argentina, England and the Netherlands. 

The tournament was a clear economic success. Kansas City saw the largest increase in consumer spending of all host cities during the group stage and Round of 32, as well as the best-ever night for hotel revenue in the city’s history and a 10X increase in short-term rental occupancy year-over-year. “Everyone has been joyous and respectful—every night is a different world party,” Kansas City local, Tony Giblin, told the New York Times. 

The World Cup’s economic boost is on the heels of more than two decades of investment in sports and entertainment infrastructure. Back in 2011, Children’s Mercy Park became one of the first soccer-specific venues in the country and continues to host Major League Soccer team Sporting KC. In 2024, the first-ever purpose-built professional women’s soccer stadium, CPKC Stadium opened as the home of the National Women’s Soccer League’s KC Current. That stadium then became the Dutch national team’s training ground during the World Cup. The decades of investment in stadiums and their supporting infrastructure has allowed local businesses to grow, too. Kansas City-based sports architecture firm Populous has now played a role in designing dozens of stadiums around the world. 

Members of the Kansas City hosting committee for the World Cup argue that the short-term economic boost of new tourists and fans, while important, is not the end goal of hosting a global event of this magnitude. The key benefit is bringing investors and corporate leaders from around the globe to see the city’s assets firsthand.  

“When we bring people here, they look around and they experience—they feel everything about Kansas City,” Tim Cowden, president and CEO of the Kansas City Area Development Council, told Fortune. “You can’t do that in a digital format.”

The city has even more major sports-related investments planned, including a proposed $1.9 billion downtown Royals baseball district, built in collaboration with another Kansas City mainstay, Hallmark Cards. The Royals project would be part of approximately $3 billion in additional capital investment planned for the city’s downtown, adding to the more than $9 billion already invested in the urban core since 2000.

Kansas City’s summer in the global spotlight shows how heartland cities can thrive with the right mix of investments and long-term vision—a theory in practice when Kansas City was first selected as a Secret Sauce community that was proven this year. Decades from now, when the story of the 2026 World Cup is distilled to a single image, it may well be one from Kansas City: 20,000 Dutch soccer fans, clad in orange, filling the streets of the same downtown district that has been the subject of so much past and planned investment.  

This year at the Heartland Summit 2026, Heartland Forward will recognize three new Secret Sauce Communities, all of which are deploying their own unique strategies for community and regional growth in both the near- and long-term. Learn more about Kansas City and the inaugural Secret Sauce communities by watching their 2018 Heartland Summit video and panel.